“When a writer is born into a family, the family is doomed,” -Czesław Miłosz

I write a lot about family, my father in particular. You might say I’m obsessed with him. Not in the way I was obsessed with him as a child, when I was a daddy’s girl. Then he was simply larger than life: a man who could magically drive a car with his elbows while lighting a pipe. A well-to-do psychiatrist who could cure any ill, who would pause from his busy patient schedule to play puppets with me. A man I believed to be fearless and invincible and perfect, as many children do.

This one-dimensional view lasted for about 28 years. Then, in 1997, inspired by a paper I was assigned in a counseling psychology Master’s program (trust me – counseling programs will break you every time), I finally saw the flaws in my little girl perspective. I finally realized that there was much more to the story—and my father. So I interviewed him.

Over the course of several days, my dad told me about his childhood in Danzig, now Gdansk in the northwest corner of Poland, shortly before World War II. He told me about watching the Nazis march—how he loved the thud of their boots as they hit the pavement, and the songs they sang about the blood of Jews dripping from knives, how he liked the tunes, though he didn’t know what they meant. He told me stories of escape, about starting over in Palestine with his parents and fighting in the war of 1948 with his high school buddy Ariel Sharon, and of his sister Luba, my aunt I never knew about, who died at Auschwitz.

Since then, I’ve written about my father incessantly, an exercise I realize has morphed him into a character in my eyes. This is slippery territory, as I must be careful to remember that how I portray him may very often not be how he sees himself.

He is aware I write about him. In fact, he wants me to write about him. At least this is what I tell myself. But I’m almost certain there is some truth to it. When I’m questioning the purity of my motives, I have a convincing body of evidence that makes me feel better, including the first memory I have of my dad, in which I’m sick in bed with a stomach virus and he comes home from work and gifts me a giant pen. First memories are filled with meaning, right? Why else would I remember this?

Or when my mother was dying in 2002 and he told me to “write it all down.” Or when he began mailing me his life in old black and white images several years ago. Or the way he often asks, “So what are you writing?” when we are on the phone together.

I must pause before answering. I am afraid of upsetting him, yet at the same time, I feel guilty when I don’t tell him, repeating the family theme of secrets all over again. Over the years I’ve selected what my father could see, mostly poems about my mother written soon after she died, and the childhood stories about his life in Danzig and early Palestine that I mailed to him.

The one time I shared a personal essay I’d written with him some years ago, it didn’t go well. The piece was called “Is it Worth the Schlep,” and it was about the challenges of taking my young children on vacation. I thought he’d find it funny, however when he called me after reading it, he was defensive and upset. For one, I’d made the statement that my family didn’t travel much when I was a child.

“What are you talking about? We traveled a lot.”

“I only remember two trips, dad. Both to Florida.”

“What about Puerto Rico?” He said. “Remember that?”

“I wasn’t born yet,“ I reminded him. “Only my sisters were there.”

And this was the more benign of the complaints.

For years, I felt certain my father would never accidentally fall upon an essay of mine, as most were published in obscure print literary journals – and by “obscure,” I mean as far as my non-writer friends and family might be concerned. For instance, The Baltimore Review—while a fine magazine and one who I am eternally grateful to for publishing an essay of mine—is no O or AARP magazine (one that my father might pick up).

In 2013, I had an essay about my father and I accepted by The Manifest-Station. It’s an online pub with a large following and so the fact that I’d used my father’s full name in the piece, made me worried someone might bring the essay to his attention.

Honestly, I’d also grown somewhat tired of keeping secrets. So after members of my writing group and my mother-in-law read the piece and assured me he’d be OK with it, possibly even touched, I decided I would share it with him before publication.

On our next phone call I asked him if he’d like to read the essay.

“I think you’ll like it, dad. Although there might be some parts that could be upsetting.”

He sounded happy when he responded that yes he’d like to read it and also quite levelheaded when he added, “If there’s anything I don’t like, we can talk about it.”

And so I emailed the essay to him.

Days went by. I didn’t hear from him. Then a week went by. I worried. He was angry. He didn’t like how I’d portrayed him. I’d hurt his feelings.

So I finally called him.

“I couldn’t download it.” My then 86-year-old father confessed. “But it’s OK…too much is going on here right now (something he often says, although I’m not sure what he means). Maybe I’ll try again later.”

I was relieved, yet disappointed. I said I’d mail it to him, the old -fashioned way.

But I have yet to do so.

Maybe one day I still will.

-2019 Writers Room Fellow Amy Yelin

Around the time I began my application to the Gish Jen Fellowship with the Writers’ Room of Boston, my Tía Monica sent me an old photo she had of me as a child. It’s blurry and somewhat dark. It shows me in my grandma’s backyard back in El Paso, Texas. I’m chasing, or maybe laughing, at a flock of pigeon’s mid-flight away. My grandma’s home sat beneath a highway overpass and you can see the support columns in the photo with the old textile factory just beyond them. There’s a couple things you can’t see in the photo though, like the train tracks behind the brick wall. Or, the canal just past the tracks where viejitos used to fish up crawdads. Or, the boarded up hole in the ground that I always assumed was for an old well. A great many things are missing from this photo, but perhaps the most important is what was right down at the end of my street. The U.S.-Mexico Border, a stone’s throw away from where I grew up.

As I write these words, “U.S. and Mexico and Border,” I think of immigration, deportation, and family separations. But, I also think of home. High School dances, late night drives, the Christmas tree lighting in the placita. Lately, these two feelings, of home and fear, have become inseparable. For all my life, a bridge meant home to me, pigeons roosting and cooing just above my head, but just last month US Immigration officials in El Paso chose to house hundreds of immigrants beneath a bridge in an outdoor detention camp. Home has become a great many things to me, but for those seeking asylum, “home” is much more complicated.

I bring all this to my current project with WROB, a play titled Wilder. Set far away from the border, the play takes place in an apartment here in Jamaica Plains. A young woman has moved back into her childhood home, a place she hasn’t set foot in since her parents were deported, with the intention of starting a foster family. The titular Wilder is a young victim of this administration’s child separation policy. The two come together during a time of heightened attention on the border, but, for these two, the border has always been a part of their lives. Two generations affected by the policies of two different administrations, each of them coming into this play with their own definitions of home.

As I’ve started work on this play, I’ve begun reading a number of books about the border and all those affected by it, but I’ve also been thinking of home. Of homemade tamales and chain link fences. Of baseball games and border checkpoints. Of family members and asylum seekers. Home is complicated, but it makes us who we are. Wilder, I hope, will help audiences explore what home means to them as these two characters try to redefine the term for themselves in a country that so desperately wants to define it for them.

A few books I’d recommend for those interested in exploring the topics I’m researching while writing Wilder:

Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli.

We Built This Wall by Eileen Truax.

In the Country We Love by Diane Guerrero.

– Andrew Siañez-De La O, 2019 Gish Jen Fellow

There is a curious and not quite consciously planned pattern in my novel’s first draft—at three different stages in the book, the narrator, a teenage girl, befriends other teenage girls who are more initiated to the dangers of the world than she is. There is Danni, her Chinese classmate who hosts get-togethers for problem students in the apartment she shares with her deaf grandmother, Addie, a biracial student attending a second-rate international school who is caught up in Shanghai’s see-and-be-seen nightlife scene, and finally Zoey, an ultra-wealthy Texan from a family relocated on an expat package, who’s glided through the city’s expat upper crust for long enough to be morally numb to excess.

At first, the fact that all three characters existed struck me as ridiculous. Clearly, I was circling around a “bad influence” character who was luring my heroine into the world of vice, and three was overkill. But I found the “bad influence” trio hard to condense. The draft is about a teenage girl and her relation to the worlds around her, and it is also about a city, Shanghai, and its complex layers. The protagonist is an outsider who doesn’t fully belong to any of these layers, and Danni, Addie, and Zoey act as gatekeepers to different worlds with starkly different racial, socioeconomic, and legal characteristics. To access these different worlds, none of which she neatly fits, my protagonist needs to befriend people in them.

In the books I was reading while working on my first draft, the “dangerous friend” emerged as a tireless archetype. It seemed like an entire “teenage girls and trouble” sub-genre featured the dichotomy of a precocious, even-keeled but waiting-for-something-to-happen main character, and an often more attractive, more fiery, and infinitely more dangerous friend who embroils the protagonist into situations with perilous stakes. But why is this such a timeless set-up for girls going down the wrong path?

It is true that the formative years of girlhood are often defined by friendship, not romance. “For so many women, the process of becoming requires two,” says Cat, the narrator of Julie Butin’s Marlena. This idea underlies many fictional female friend duos: Zadie Smith noted in an interview⁠ that the impetus for her novel Swing Time came from a recurring theme in her conversations with women, whose “childhood friendships are dominant in their minds and imaginations.”

It is tempting to discern a pattern where the less outwardly magnetic character is by nature the observer and the chronicler. In the fictional friend duos, a recurring theme is the imbalance in power or charisma between a more dominant character and a less worldly-wise friend; curiously, the “follower” of the duo is often the one taking charge of the story as the narrator, soaking up and spilling back out the life fuel syphoned from the dominant friend. These stories often track parallel fates where the beautiful, dangerous friend succumbs to tragedy like moth to fire, while the observer-narrator survives, not unscathed by moral perils, and can tell the story of their coming-of-age. My past year’s reading list offered no dearth of examples: Marlena, a novel set in a bleak low-income community in rural Michigan, has the title character as the beautiful, vulnerable, and badly behaved new best friend that the new-to-town narrator simultaneously envies, emulates, protects, and exploits.  In the Girls from Corona del Mar, the pretty, enviable best friend with the seemingly perfect life that degrades into tragedy haunts the cerebral, academically successful narrator. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Elena, the observant but more restrained narrator, is the witness and actor in the saga she shares with the life-force that is her friend Lila— charming, feral, fearless, grinding her way through life while generating flying sparks that Elena cannot as easily produce.  Love and resentment coexist in these narrators’ tones: they want to be like their friends, but not end up like them.

---

Of course, there were plenty of exceptions and complications to this dichotomy. In Ugly Girls, a gritty trailer park coming-of-age story, Perry is the pretty cold fish, but her best friend Baby Girl is the one reeling from recent tragedy and taking out her rage by vandalizing her own appearance, succumbing to dark impulses that get the girls into intractable trouble. Neither girl dominates the narrative, but it is the scarred, emotionally vulnerable, and physically diffident Baby Girl who is headed towards tragedy, not the beautiful, apathetic Perry. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s A Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator is a textbook parody of a “bad friend”—a young woman who is beautiful, wealthy, and seemingly emotionally and morally despondent. Her self-appointed sidekick, Reva, is the one who desperately tries to maintain the friendship through visits to the narrator’s apartment, chattering about her insecurities and sorrows. While Reva drinks alone and spills her guts to the narrator, the latter makes it no secret that she finds Reva pathetic and her presence unwelcome. Still, oddly, Reva is the life force that humanizes the story, providing relief and pathos for the reader to break up long stretches of the narrator’s largely pharmaceutically focused and eventless interior life (the backstory of a tragic childhood is interspersed, but feels like an afterthought). Reva is also a gatekeeper in the novel—to the outside world that the narrator so doggedly tries to shun, only to find it intruding her “relaxation” time and again, in the form of a Reva determined to share the indignities and mundanities of the human experience with the one person who seems to refuse human connection.

In a Guardian article^⁠ on the recent flourishing of novels on dangerous female friendship, Alex Clark notes that the setup is often not as straightforward as “friends as bad influence,” but rather commentary on the protagonist’s “surrender to the enablement of transgressive behavior, while simultaneously being able to pretend that it is at a distance.” After all, starting with Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, dangerous best friends are not just there to one-dimensionally corrupt the innocent; the story is often about just how much the “innocent” was courting danger in the first place.  In Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, which features a duo of female friends at its center, the narrator is more sardonic and less fiery than Bobbi, who at first deceivingly seems like the daredevil who initiates the narrator into a world of older, wealthier artists on the London scene. The opening chapters deliver this plot point, but the “corrupting best friend” archetype more or less dissolves here. The narrator largely takes responsibility as the originator of her ethically prickly decisions throughout the novel; in fact, she hides her transgressions from Bobbi. Whether their relationship can survive the revelation that the placid narrator has been living a secret amoral life becomes one of the story’s central tensions.

In my novel-in-progress, the protagonist is not so much concerned with building friendships as much as trying out different associations and testing her own boundaries; she is beguiled by the notion that it is through transgressing outward that one can come to define one’s own edges. Literary scholar Elizabeth Abel hypothesized in a 1981 essay that female friendship in fiction is a central vehicle for a character to build a sense of self through a deliberate quest of identification with another. This makes sense in coming-of-age fiction: you want to befriend those you wish to identify with, and sometimes you need to stretch yourself to fit that identity. I’ve come to think that a narrator like mine isn’t so much a cold, calculating monster with a predetermined social Everest to climb, but rather a fairly normal teenager who is trying to associate with the kind of people she thinks she might want to become. The darkness emerges from how quickly a person is willing to identify with a friend, then discard her after discovering this specific identification comes with obvious drawbacks, no longer fits, or can be swapped for a better model.

In revising, I must address the fear that my narrator’s three relationships with dangerous friends will feel synthetic. Although these associations are artificial in design in my narrator’s mind, they must still yield real emotions and consequences. The protagonist, Danni, Addie, and Zoey fail to protect each other because the culture of transactionalism and hedonism that permeates some circles in Shanghai (and many a New York or L.A. coming-of-age novel) dictates that people who you think can serve up nominal friendship, or at least won’t consciously leave you in harm’s way, often fail to meet the lowest of expectations.

Characters we create can begin telling their own stories to us based on motifs we were not aware we had sprinkled through our drafts. Unwittingly, the pattern of attempted friendships or associations with dangerous girls revealed another central theme of my novel, which was how ultimately friendless the protagonist is, and how much of an outsider she still remains despite her various forays. The one consequence to her dangerous friendships that she is certain to reap is not the perverse glamour of self-destruction, but loneliness. She is her own only friend, and a dangerous one.

Aube Rey Lescure
2019 Ivan Gold Fellow

There is a curious and not quite consciously planned pattern in my novel’s first draft—at three different stages in the book, the narrator, a teenage girl, befriends other teenage girls who are more initiated to the dangers of the world than she is. There is Danni, her Chinese classmate who hosts get-togethers for problem students in the apartment she shares with her deaf grandmother, Addie, a biracial student attending a second-rate international school who is caught up in Shanghai’s see-and-be-seen nightlife scene, and finally Zoey, an ultra-wealthy Texan from a family relocated on an expat package, who’s glided through the city’s expat upper crust for long enough to be morally numb to excess.

At first, the fact that all three characters existed struck me as ridiculous. Clearly, I was circling around a “bad influence” character who was luring my heroine into the world of vice, and three was overkill. But I found the “bad influence” trio hard to condense. The draft is about a teenage girl and her relation to the worlds around her, and it is also about a city, Shanghai, and its complex layers. The protagonist is an outsider who doesn’t fully belong to any of these layers, and Danni, Addie, and Zoey act as gatekeepers to different worlds with starkly different racial, socioeconomic, and legal characteristics. To access these different worlds, none of which she neatly fits, my protagonist needs to befriend people in them.

In the books I was reading while working on my first draft, the “dangerous friend” emerged as a tireless archetype. It seemed like an entire “teenage girls and trouble” sub-genre featured the dichotomy of a precocious, even-keeled but waiting-for-something-to-happen main character, and an often more attractive, more fiery, and infinitely more dangerous friend who embroils the protagonist into situations with perilous stakes. But why is this such a timeless set-up for girls going down the wrong path?

It is true that the formative years of girlhood are often defined by friendship, not romance. “For so many women, the process of becoming requires two,” says Cat, the narrator of Julie Butin’s Marlena. This idea underlies many fictional female friend duos: Zadie Smith noted in an interview⁠ that the impetus for her novel Swing Time came from a recurring theme in her conversations with women, whose “childhood friendships are dominant in their minds and imaginations.”

It is tempting to discern a pattern where the less outwardly magnetic character is by nature the observer and the chronicler. In the fictional friend duos, a recurring theme is the imbalance in power or charisma between a more dominant character and a less worldly-wise friend; curiously, the “follower” of the duo is often the one taking charge of the story as the narrator, soaking up and spilling back out the life fuel syphoned from the dominant friend. These stories often track parallel fates where the beautiful, dangerous friend succumbs to tragedy like moth to fire, while the observer-narrator survives, not unscathed by moral perils, and can tell the story of their coming-of-age. My past year’s reading list offered no dearth of examples: Marlena, a novel set in a bleak low-income community in rural Michigan, has the title character as the beautiful, vulnerable, and badly behaved new best friend that the new-to-town narrator simultaneously envies, emulates, protects, and exploits.  In the Girls from Corona del Mar, the pretty, enviable best friend with the seemingly perfect life that degrades into tragedy haunts the cerebral, academically successful narrator. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Elena, the observant but more restrained narrator, is the witness and actor in the saga she shares with the life-force that is her friend Lila— charming, feral, fearless, grinding her way through life while generating flying sparks that Elena cannot as easily produce.  Love and resentment coexist in these narrators’ tones: they want to be like their friends, but not end up like them.

---

Of course, there were plenty of exceptions and complications to this dichotomy. In Ugly Girls, a gritty trailer park coming-of-age story, Perry is the pretty cold fish, but her best friend Baby Girl is the one reeling from recent tragedy and taking out her rage by vandalizing her own appearance, succumbing to dark impulses that get the girls into intractable trouble. Neither girl dominates the narrative, but it is the scarred, emotionally vulnerable, and physically diffident Baby Girl who is headed towards tragedy, not the beautiful, apathetic Perry. In Ottessa Moshfegh’s A Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator is a textbook parody of a “bad friend”—a young woman who is beautiful, wealthy, and seemingly emotionally and morally despondent. Her self-appointed sidekick, Reva, is the one who desperately tries to maintain the friendship through visits to the narrator’s apartment, chattering about her insecurities and sorrows. While Reva drinks alone and spills her guts to the narrator, the latter makes it no secret that she finds Reva pathetic and her presence unwelcome. Still, oddly, Reva is the life force that humanizes the story, providing relief and pathos for the reader to break up long stretches of the narrator’s largely pharmaceutically focused and eventless interior life (the backstory of a tragic childhood is interspersed, but feels like an afterthought). Reva is also a gatekeeper in the novel—to the outside world that the narrator so doggedly tries to shun, only to find it intruding her “relaxation” time and again, in the form of a Reva determined to share the indignities and mundanities of the human experience with the one person who seems to refuse human connection.

In a Guardian article^⁠ on the recent flourishing of novels on dangerous female friendship, Alex Clark notes that the setup is often not as straightforward as “friends as bad influence,” but rather commentary on the protagonist’s “surrender to the enablement of transgressive behavior, while simultaneously being able to pretend that it is at a distance.” After all, starting with Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, dangerous best friends are not just there to one-dimensionally corrupt the innocent; the story is often about just how much the “innocent” was courting danger in the first place.  In Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, which features a duo of female friends at its center, the narrator is more sardonic and less fiery than Bobbi, who at first deceivingly seems like the daredevil who initiates the narrator into a world of older, wealthier artists on the London scene. The opening chapters deliver this plot point, but the “corrupting best friend” archetype more or less dissolves here. The narrator largely takes responsibility as the originator of her ethically prickly decisions throughout the novel; in fact, she hides her transgressions from Bobbi. Whether their relationship can survive the revelation that the placid narrator has been living a secret amoral life becomes one of the story’s central tensions.

In my novel-in-progress, the protagonist is not so much concerned with building friendships as much as trying out different associations and testing her own boundaries; she is beguiled by the notion that it is through transgressing outward that one can come to define one’s own edges. Literary scholar Elizabeth Abel hypothesized in a 1981 essay that female friendship in fiction is a central vehicle for a character to build a sense of self through a deliberate quest of identification with another. This makes sense in coming-of-age fiction: you want to befriend those you wish to identify with, and sometimes you need to stretch yourself to fit that identity. I’ve come to think that a narrator like mine isn’t so much a cold, calculating monster with a predetermined social Everest to climb, but rather a fairly normal teenager who is trying to associate with the kind of people she thinks she might want to become. The darkness emerges from how quickly a person is willing to identify with a friend, then discard her after discovering this specific identification comes with obvious drawbacks, no longer fits, or can be swapped for a better model.

In revising, I must address the fear that my narrator’s three relationships with dangerous friends will feel synthetic. Although these associations are artificial in design in my narrator’s mind, they must still yield real emotions and consequences. The protagonist, Danni, Addie, and Zoey fail to protect each other because the culture of transactionalism and hedonism that permeates some circles in Shanghai (and many a New York or L.A. coming-of-age novel) dictates that people who you think can serve up nominal friendship, or at least won’t consciously leave you in harm’s way, often fail to meet the lowest of expectations.

Characters we create can begin telling their own stories to us based on motifs we were not aware we had sprinkled through our drafts. Unwittingly, the pattern of attempted friendships or associations with dangerous girls revealed another central theme of my novel, which was how ultimately friendless the protagonist is, and how much of an outsider she still remains despite her various forays. The one consequence to her dangerous friendships that she is certain to reap is not the perverse glamour of self-destruction, but loneliness. She is her own only friend, and a dangerous one.

Aube Rey Lescure
2019 Ivan Gold Fellow